Straining every fiber of muscle, I get one foot under me, then balance the load across my right shoulder and lunge upward, whipping my left foot under me as I rise. Once both feet are beneath me, it’s only a matter of steadying myself before I can start across the floor toward the far door.

Caitlin leads the way, and I follow the white flag of her blouse through the smoke. She pauses at the stairs, meaning to help, but I bull forward and she scrambles out of the way.

There are only a few steps to climb. This stairwell leads out to the yard and not up to the next floor. As I reach the top, pure cold air flows into my lungs like the breath of God, and the load on my shoulders vanishes to nothing.

CHAPTER 96

TOM STOOD AT the edge of the lake, shivering in a raincoat he’d found in Drew’s closet. His wounded shoulder throbbed relentlessly, but he fought the urge to take another pain pill. The dose of narcotics required to dull that pain could easily depress his respiratory function to a lethal level. On the other hand, going without relief might raise his stress level to the point that it triggered another heart attack. The bullet wound was relatively minor, as missile injuries went. A battlefield medic would have popped him with a syrette of morphine, patched the holes, and moved on to the next foxhole. But at seventy-three, alone in the night, he felt the pain of that wound beginning to work on him.

Most M.D.s understood pain about as well as most lawyers understood prison. Doctors believed they understood pain, since they’d experienced the mild or moderate forms at some point in their lives. But two years in Korea—and twenty years of living with psoriatic arthritis and diabetes and coronary artery disease—had taught Tom the true nature of pain, from the slicing, electric burn of a nerve to the bluntest fist crushing the chest. Melba hadn’t been gone long, but already her words of faith seemed distant and ephemeral. In all his life, he had never felt so alone as he did now.

Just after his nurse left, he’d sat on the sofa and immediately fallen asleep. Jerking awake a few minutes later, he was gripped by the certainty that if he sank into deep sleep he would never wake again. Many of his patients had experienced this premonition over the years, and often enough reality had borne it out. In the end, he’d chewed up half a Lorcet with a nitro chaser, then walked down to the water’s edge, where the cold would keep him awake.